by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
The genesis of Monday’s groundbreaking for Saft’s high-tech battery manufacturing plant at Cecil Commerce Center goes back to last summer’s Paris Air Show.
While local officials faced plenty of scrutiny for attending the show — especially City Council President Richard Clark, who took his wife on the visit — the trip set the table for landing Saft, the leading manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries in the world.
“This is the factory of the future,” said Saft America Inc. Program Manager Peter Denoncourt, who called the groundbreaking an “exciting day and an important milestone” for the company and Jacksonville.
Thanks to a $95 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and $95 million of its own money, Saft will build a 235,000-square-foot plant and hire almost 300 people. Denoncourt said the company, which has 16 wholly owned facilities worldwide and six now in the United States, has more than 2 million lithium-ion battery customers around the world. Overall, the company employs more than 4,000 people worldwide and had sales of nearly $900 million in 2008.
“We want to be in production by early 2011, so we have an aggressive schedule,” said Denoncourt.
Clark said he met with Saft officials during his trip to Paris, where he promoted Cecil Commerce Center as an ideal facility for expansion.
“This center has become an increasingly valuable asset,” said Clark. “I am personally very glad to be involved in this project. We had great meeting with representatives from Saft and I am glad it worked out as well as it did.”
The batteries Saft produces are used for a variety of purposes and designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible. They are used in military vehicles, rail cars, for backup power and lighting. Locally, CSX is a customer as are Florida Power & Light and NASA.
Jerry Mallot, president of the Cornerstone Regional Development Partnership and vice president of the Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce, said it took a team from his office, the mayor’s office, the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission and the state to make the deal happen.
“These things don’t happen on the state side and the community side by accident,” he said, adding Saft is exactly the kind of company City and Chamber officials want to lure to Cecil. “The project had every characteristic we could want. It’s a technology company and it manufactures green energy products. There was a very high capital investment, which was important to us.”
Tom Alcide, CEO of Saft, put the Jacksonville plant in perspective.
“This is Saft’s single-largest investment in our history and we are excited about it,” he said, adding the company will have a team of about 30 in the area while the plant is under construction. “We are going to keep this project on schedule.”
The plant was designed and will be built by The Haskell Company. The goal is to use as much of the local workforce as possible for construction and employment.
“We are doing as much as we can to keep as much of the project in Jacksonville as possible,” said Alcide.
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